Wow, I'm ACTUALLY posting something... The world must be ending! Hope you guess like this. Sorry for any grammar/spelling I may have missed.
La La~ I don't own L4D, just the characters and the story, you know the dead... I mean deal, ha ha...
The rain fell hard over the broken city, both a comfort from the hell fire that normally surrounded us, and a hindering curtain of depression. I sat on the sill of the barred window of our latest safe-house staring out over the empty streets. It surprised me that the infected still had enough sense to get out of the rain, but maybe they were all just... somewhere else. The leather of the simple cross necklace wrapped around my fingers grounded me.
Everyone dies.
The thought did little to soothe my mind, or my sorrow. The other survivors in the room talked in quite whispers. I could not blame them, none of them had known us before the infection. I couldn't expect them... to what? To understand?
I didn't want anything from them. Zack was gone, dead. My best friend, my last connection to the past.
They had done nothing to try to save him, just stared, petrified by their own self preservation. But it was his own fault, right? 'Cause he had fallen behind?
"You should get some sleep," The only girl in our little group of six... five, (Anna?) Said. I found I didn't much care if her name was Anna, or Julia, or Dirt, her name wasn't Zack, and she wasn't my friend.
"I will," my voice sounded rough even to my own ears. The sun was just barely setting and I knew we would be here until morning. It was too dangerous to travel at night, rain or no. But beyond that, my mind would never allow me to sleep. I rubbed my friend's cross between my fingers.
Anna seemed dissatisfied with my response, but returned to her sleeping bag none the less.
The rain continued to fall, some of it coming through the open window and soaking my filthy clothing. The cold felt good though, and I thought about the irony of dying of the real flu. It almost made me laugh. Almost.
It was a smoker. It had grabbed him just as the safe-house had come into view. I shot the smoker, but by then he had been dragged into a horde and I couldn't get to him. Evan grabbed me from behind and dragged me into the safe-house as I tried to run after him. By the time the horde left, all that was left of him was his necklace.
In that moment nothing seemed important. I thought about our destination, the vaguely described "safe-zone." Could such a place even exist? How many barricades had the infected already gotten through? How many evacuation sites had we been to, and all of them lay in ruin.
But what if it did exist, this perfect paradise where the infected couldn't touch us, and we could sleep soundly at night. So what? The world would never go back to normal, the infection wouldn't go away, even if it was on the other side of a wall.
I also thought about God. Did God even exist in this hell? What could we have possibly done to warrant a punishment like this? I had never been very religious, but Zack had been something of a "good Christian" and we had talked about it often.
That had been one of the many things I loved about Zack. He never judged anyone. He could talk about his beliefs calmly and rationally without making you feel stupid or trying to change your opinion. He truly loved God and life and people: and every time I was around him, so did I.
I have nothing to live for now, everyone I know is dead.
The glowing eyes of the infected stared up at me from the dead city below.
I didn't sleep that night, like I was suppose to, just stared at the zombies staring back at me. The sun started to rise and my companions began to wake from their restless sleep and gather their meager possessions. Anna looked at me with an unreadable expression, but said nothing. For that I suppose I was grateful, but honestly I didn't really care if she said anything or not. Zack was dead.
I ate nothing of our rations before we departed. Anna gave me a worried look and I was beginning to become irritated with her obvious concern for me.
I had thought, long ago, back when zombies were about as real as unicorns, that I would have liked being in a zombie apocalypse. The thought of killing zombies had sounded fun. It was sort of liberating I suppose, but being caked in blood and grime and unmentionable filth for days, with no conceivable end, is anything but fun; but it was like a duty, you didn't question it. Move along, stay together, kill zombies, don't think, don't feel, just survive.
Just survive.
We went for days like that, moving from safe-house to safe-house, never saying more than a few words at a time to each other. And then, just like that, everything changed.
We came across a tree with a Smoker hanging from one of it's branches. He had a barbed wire noose around he's neck and he had his stomach split so that his guts spilled across the pavement. His tongue was wrapped around the branch as though he had tried to save himself and his hands were bloody and torn.
I should have been happy, should have hated him, and all Smokers, for what had happened, but I didn't. I felt profoundly sad. The thing in that tree had been human, just like Zack. He had had friends, and family, perhaps even a wife and kids. Who was the real monster? That man, who was only sick with a horrible disease or the one that put him there, and made him suffer?
The laughs of my companions at the creature's plight told me they believed it to be the former. But I was not so sure anymore. What gave us the right to kill all these people? Even if they are trying to kill us. What makes us any better than them? They are sick, they don't have a choice anymore about attacking us, but we do have a choice. And yet we still choose to kill them?
I went over to the Smoker and started to carefully cut him down. I had to, what was left of my humanity demanded it. I didn't care that the wire was dulling my blade, didn't care that they were all staring at me. I felt a light touch on my shoulder and turned to see Gregory looking down at me sadly. He was a good kid, the youngest of our group, and it occurred to me that he hadn't been one of the ones laughing. He helped me untangle the barbed wire from around the dead Smokers neck as the others watched, completely dumbfounded by our act of compassion.
I honestly don't know why we did it. We shouldn't have, but we took the time and precious energy to dig a small grave under the tree and buried the Smoker there with several small rocks for a head stone. Maybe it eased our minds, to pay respects to at least one human who had lost everything to this disease. Or maybe we just wanted to prove we were still human, and capable of compassion. Either way, there's a nameless man buried under that tree now, perhaps the last human that will ever be buried in this world.
I couldn't kill them after that. All I thought about was Zack and the Smoker and life and death, and I couldn't bring myself to kill any more of them. Even if I had already watched hundreds fall under my axe's blade. I nearly got us all killed half a dozen times or more, just standing there like a moron with my mouth slightly open. I just stood there, staring, as though into infinity, at the endless horde of infected humans. They weren't animals anymore. It wasn't us versus them, it wasn't survivor versus infected (sick, dead, zombies, monsters.) They were just people, people I had to kill in order to live.
I didn't want to live in a world like that, but I caught a glimpse of something shiny and looked down to see the necklace still wrapped around my wrist. Zack. If I died, so would his memory. I couldn't let that happen. If I had to sacrifice my humanity by killing these people in order to keep his memory alive, then so be it, that would be my punishment for not being able to save him.
I felt as though I was the one being hit as I swung my axe at the nearest infected. A woman, I imagine she had been beautiful before the infection, her hair red from what I could see under the grime and dirt matting it to her head in a horrible rats nest, but maybe it was just the blood that made it red. Her eyes were void of anything but rage and she seemed to almost not notice the giant whole I had just put in her chest with my weapon. She coughed up her black blood onto my face and chest, then fell to the ground, dead.
In a way, she was the first person I killed. She was human in my eyes when I killed her. I was a murderer. The reason I killed her didn't matter, she was dead, and it was my fault. It made me sad and angry and full of self-loathing all at once and I almost fell to my knees in despair.
I felt Evan punch me in the shoulder. "Get a hold of yourself man, or we're all going to fucking die out here." He was right, of course, I had been lucky so far, but if I continued to test my luck we would all die. I pushed my feelings to the back of my mind and slipped into the old mind set: kill anything that gets in my way.
The next safe-house we got to was part of a run down two-story warehouse. The heavy metal door led to what looked like a break room with a staircase in the back that led to a second room. I wanted nothing to do with my companions at that moment, so I immediately headed for the staircase and ignored their offers of food and water.
I didn't think of much as I sat there doing nothing, not listening to the sounds downstairs, or the faint sounds of the infected killing each other and anything else dumb enough to get close. I suppose I came to terms with being a murderer, as much as one can come to terms with it, but I didn't feel guilt, or remorse like I did when it happened. I attributed it to Zack's memory, but something in me didn't feel quite right.
It was long after dark before I heard the hesitant footsteps up the stairs. Gregory then came silently into the room rubbing his knuckles together as he searched for me in the darkness.
"I'm over here, kid. What do you want?" He walked over to me without saying a word and sat down next to me before handing me a protein bar and turning to hug his knees.
"I know you haven't eaten today, so..." He was such a kid. I thanked him for the protein bar and started to eat it.
I heard sniffling and looked over to see tears rolling down Gregory's face. "Wow, hey! Don't cry, what's wrong?" He turned and buried his head in my chest and fisted his hand in my shirt. I had forgotten how good it felt to be touched by another human-being, one that wasn't trying to kill you. I felt his tears began to soak through my shirt as I rubbed slow circles in his back with one hand. I wouldn't be eating the rest of that protein bar now.
"It's ok kid," What part of this is "ok" exactly? I frowned at that thought, but it did seem to calm the kid down a bit. He unclenched my shirt and wiped his eyes, but otherwise stayed where he was.
I guess he misses touching other people too.
Comforting him took some of the sorrow off of my own heart, and for that I was grateful. But this kid had that effect on people. He wasn't overly cheerful; I'd barely seen him smile twice in the four weeks we'd been together. Something about him just put your mind at ease, which was odd considering how nervous he always was.
It didn't take long for the kid to cry himself to sleep, and then I was alone again, more or less. But this time I did listen to the sounds outside, the sounds of the commons fighting amongst themselves and the distant rumble of a passing Tank. My mind felt lighter, freer, and it was all thanks to this kid.